Friday, February 2, 2001

Forrester Gives UK eGovernment A Failing Grade

The UK government's current strategy for delivering online services is failing to make the grade and is consequently jeopardising £3.7 billion in cost savings, according to a new Report by Forrester Research. Recouping these monies will require a new approach to private-sector partnerships, one which includes revenue-sharing models, Forrester advises.

In November 2000, Forrester conducted in-depth research with 14 UK government agencies, grading these departments on the vision, implementation, partnerships and savings sharing of their eGovernment efforts.

"All government agencies suffer from gaps in knowledge and understanding, and the inability to implement innovative services is holding the government back," commented Forrester analyst Caroline Sceats. "By mid-2002, the government will drop the go-it-alone strategy, opening up business processes and service opportunities to new partners.

"The government will adopt the eBusiness network framework, where a 'resilient structure of interdependent players co-operates in real time over the Net to get a job done'. This will require the government to share its savings on data and financial transactions with the private sector, creating a commercial market worth £730 million by 2005."

Established eCommerce Integrators (eCIs) will dominate business payments, and pre-processing business taxes will result in £11 million in government fees per year by 2004. Technology giants will partner to build financial-management hubs. But the area of greatest opportunity in an eGovernment network will be for the small, fast-moving technology vendors that create a layer of continuously moving data flows. The fees available for successfully migrating data matchmaking to the private sector will cost government £207 million per year in 2005.

"With consumer-facing services constantly changing and developing at the pace of the Internet, the smaller, nimbler eCIs will be the ones best suited to matching demand from consumers to the relevant area of government," Sceats adds. "As well as fees direct from government processing savings, match makers will take a piece of the £18 million in revenues that their attracter partners receive.

"The government should let go of fears that private-sector charges will lead to preferential services for the wealthy. Private-sector data transactions will never get off the ground if the government doesn't accept that differentiation on services will drive £3 to £5 convenience fees from consumers. Instead, the government must concentrate on improving the performance of base-level services to all consumers through the £406 million per year in savings that match makers bring by 2003."

Survey Methodology
Forrester interviewed a representative sample of government departments. We scored each department against 12 criteria across four categories -- long-term vision, functional capability to deliver on that vision, strategies for building external partnerships and understanding of potential savings. Each criterion had a maximum score of five and a minimum of one, giving a maximum category score of 15 and a potential total score of 60. We then graded overall scores between an A (53-60 points) and an F (12-20 points). We also invited feedback from graded departments, and grading results were returned to interviewees before publication for comment and correction of any factual errors.

Super Bowl Streaming Content Scores A Touchdown
Streaming content available to online fans on the official Super Bowl site at www.superbowl.com delivered a touchdown with exceptional quality and performance over the weekend, according to Keynote. According to the Keynote Scale for Streaming, an industry standard for ranking streaming quality on a scale from 0 to 10, the superbowl.com streams ranked very highly, in the 5.78 range, with rendering quality of 100%, based on the site's ability to deliver its intended quality. Yet, access to the site's homepage slowed almost four times to 9.18 seconds from 6:00pm to 7:00pm as online fans were invited to vote for Most Valuable Player, compared to the site's normal performance of two to three seconds.

Web site performance for the Super Bowl advertisers was good overall prior to and during the game, with both Hotjobs.com and XFL.com markedly improving the weekend of the game compared to the prior weekend. With Web page size remaining constant, the improvement suggests that both sites made server or infrastructure changes to prepare for increased traffic resulting from their Super Bowl ads. Hotjobs.com's site performance averaged 1.18 seconds during the game compared to 6.93 seconds the previous Sunday afternoon, and XFL.com improved to 2.30 seconds during the game from 9.46 seconds the previous Sunday afternoon.

Exceptions included Mastercard.com and VW.com, both slowing significantly during the game broadcast. It took online users as much as three times as long to access Mastercard.com during the game as before, with the site slowing to 14.39 seconds between 7:00 and 8:00pm and 87 percent availability from an average 4.44 seconds that morning. VW.com slowed from 2.72 seconds before the game to 4.20 seconds during the game. Two sites, VW.com and Sonypictures.com, exhibited very slow performance Monday morning following Sunday's game, with VW.com slowing to 12.41 seconds and Sonypictures.com to 65.26 seconds (from an average under 6.0 seconds during the game) as fans returned to work.

"Superbowl.com and its partners did an excellent job streaming from the site, with very high quality and availability, delivered at a high bandwidth," said Dan Todd, Chief Technologist for Public Services at Keynote. "If all sites could stream at this rate, the overall quality of streaming content on the Web would be much higher. The streaming performance of Superbowl.com is two full points higher than the typical average on the Keynote Scale for Streaming."

Keynote measured the performance and availability of Web sites for 36 companies advertising during the Super Bowl from 5:00am to 8:00pm PST on Saturday and Sunday, January 27 and 28, 2001. Keynote also measured the performance of representative streams on the superbowl.com site, including the press conference streams for both the Giants and Ravens teams, and the Super Bowl Diaries webcast from the site. Keynote took streaming measurements from 8:00am to 8:00pm on January 27 and 28 from its streaming performance measurement computers in 10 major cities throughout the U.S. Keynote measured Web site performance using its automated measurement computers at 66 Internet access points in 25 metropolitan areas around the United States which are connected to the Internet via T-1 and T-3 communication lines.